BEIJING, May 5 Kyodo North Korea ...

BEIJING, May 5 Kyodo

North Korea onward Monday rejected as ''foolish'' the latest U designation of it as a state sponsor of terrorism, saying that doing in like manner only complicates the dispute between the brace countries over the North's nuclear program.

''The U smear campaign against the DPRK will single make the settlement of the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the United States more complicated and aggravate the situation,'' a Foreign Ministry spokesman told the Korean Central moderns Agency (KCNA), monitored in Beijing.

The DPRK is an abbreviation for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The U State Department's latest annual report upon global terrorism, released last Wednesday, designates North Korea as single in kind of seven ''state sponsors'' of terrorism along with Iran, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, Iraq and Libya.

The report says that despite the urging of the international community, North Korea has not taken substantial stairs to cooperate in efforts to combat terrorism.

While North Korea is not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since 1987 it has sold weapons to several terrorist assemblages and has provided safe haven to Japanese R Army Faction members who hijacked a Japan Airlines flight to Pyongyang in 1970

It has also continued to put up to sale ballistic missile technology to other countries designated on the U.S. as state sponsors of terrorism, including Syria and Libya, the report says.

''This alone shows how preposterous the DPRK policy of the (George W) Bush administration is,'' the North Korean spokesman said of the charges.

He called the U practice of listing countries that incur its displeasure as state sponsors of terrorism ''a trite trick to militarily stifle those countries.''

''It is the intention of the U to 'Americanize' the world by means of unhesitatingly committing such state terrorism as unethical, anti-Islamic Iraqi war subject to the pretext of 'antiterrorism' in disregard of international law and the United Nations,'' the spokesman said.

''But the U is seriously mistaken if it thinks its practice will make progress down with the DPRK,'' he said.

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